Technology Lab —

Know anyone who worked as game dev for the Commodore Amiga?

Did you, or anyone you know, ever work in game development for the Commodore Amiga?

If so, I'd like to hear from you.

In August 2007, I started writing the history of the Amiga computer for Ars Technica. Seven installments were published, starting with the founding of the company, carrying on through the Commodore purchase and unveiling of the Amiga 1000, and looking at the struggles the company experienced in the years that followed. At that point, I had decided to leave the chronological tale and spend some time looking at various sub-cultures of the Amiga experience. The first subculture I tackled was gaming. I wrote one article about the games themselves, but then I turned to what I thought was more interesting: the lives of the games developers.

Turns out it's really hard to find contact information for people whose names appeared on Amiga game boxes in the 1980s! Some have become heads of game studios, while others have gone on to other projects, but one constant is that finding working email addresses for these folks is almost impossible. So I'm casting out a plea to the World Wide Internets. If any of you know someone who once worked on any Amiga game, whether it was as a programmer, artist, tester, or manager, please let me know! I'm interested in talking to you about your work, what tools you used, and the general environment of the time.

Also, a special thanks goes out to all the people who have emailed me over the last year, politely inquiring about the status of the next installment of the Amiga history series. I've had a busy year, but I'm excited about picking up the tale again in 2010.

This won't get you email addresses, and it's likely that you already know about it, but Mobygame's database of game credits is invaluable for anyone interested in the history of computer games and the people who made them.

Don't know anyone that did games, but I knew Eric Quackenbush who did the Disk Mechanic for the Amiga. He was an amazing developer (probably still is). Last I heard he went to work for Greater Valley Products (I think that's what they were called).

Also, what ever happened to this guy named Riechart Von Wolfshield (I probably just slaughtered the spelling of his name). He was quite a character.

Anyway, I'll dig around my old rolodex...if I can find it...to see if I can dig up some names for the article.

I worked for the original Mindscape software,a division of Scott Foresman Publishing, in Northbrook, IL in 1984-85. We were involved in the development of some of the early software for the Commodore Amiga. I am not a developer but I was one of the graphic artists that worked on the original typing tutorial that came with the Amiga. It was a long time ago but I still remember the excitement felt by myself and the other artists to finally have a system with more than 16 colors available for graphics. I also remember the "black box" Amiga's we got from Commodore to develop on. They were very unstable and we learned quickly to save our work about every 1-2 minutes so we didn't lose our images.

Not related to the original inquiry, but I just found out about Pinball Dreams and Pinball Fantasies(strangely, digital illusions nowhere to be credited for the original work) being ported to the PSP & PS3 as minis, and I have to say it brought back very fond memories of Amiga gaming at it's finest...

You might wanna try Mike Dailly and Dave Jones, of DMA Design (now Rockstar North), both were involved in the creation of Lemmings (see http://www.dmadesign.org for Mike's account) way back in the dusty days of the Amiga. I don't happen to have any contact details, but any info's better than none, right?

I did some commercial graphics on the Amiga. Mainly I used Lightwave3d 4, DpaintV or Photogenics. I remember it being very straightforward to produce animations with bitmaps or utilizing colour cycling. Very stable, multi screen, multi resolution all in a very multi-tasking environment.

Systems and software are, of course, more powerful now but we definitely lost something along the way. The iPhone, iMovie, Final Cut and maybe Pages are the latter-day examples of the joy of using the system.

Look forward to reading your article and I hope it can give someone an idea or two.

Chris Hülsbeck did some great music for some great Amiga games back in the day. Most notably the Turrican series by Factor 5. It's still some of the best gaming music I've heard today. At the time, there was only 4 channel audio for the Amiga, but the team along with Chris came up with a revolutionary proprietary 8 channel format for Turrican 2. It was amazing.

I've gotten so tired of hearing about all those old-school gaming consoles or computers that were epically awesome. So epically awesome, they failed completely in the marketplace. Also, I think a conservative estimate is at least half of those who claim they had one of these god machines are lying posers.

Originally posted by TiredMemeCat:I've gotten so tired of hearing about all those old-school gaming consoles or computers that were epically awesome. So epically awesome, they failed completely in the marketplace. Also, I think a conservative estimate is at least half of those who claim they had one of these god machines are lying posers.

Perhaps you should skip these articles then.

I had an Amiga 500, lots of people did, it wasn't a "god machine" and I have fond memories of playing games on it, and I'm glad Jeremy has decided to continue the Amiga story. Me and some of my other friends were wondering if you were going to continue it.

The cinemaware website has a list of alumni who worked on their older titles.

Originally posted by TiredMemeCat:I've gotten so tired of hearing about all those old-school gaming consoles or computers that were epically awesome. So epically awesome, they failed completely in the marketplace. Also, I think a conservative estimate is at least half of those who claim they had one of these god machines are lying posers.

The Amiga and Video Toaster were what was used for Dire Straits "Money For Nothing" video and were used heavily in special effects and such for over a decade. They were still being utilized during the first season or 2 of Babylon 5. That's some pretty good legs on those old systems.

I never owned an Amiga, one of my best friends had one. It had some neat stuff my PC didn't, I had neat stuff he didn't. I've enjoyed the series of articles just b/c I enjoy computer history.

Also, from this and everything else that exists about the history of the Amiga, it was very poorly managed. In an alternate universe with proper marketing and such, who knows.

EDIT: Oh and for old consoles being epically awesome, my ATARI 2600 still is. Hell, it still works 30 years after I got it, unlike all my friends who have bought XBOX 360s.

Originally posted by TiredMemeCat:I've gotten so tired of hearing about all those old-school gaming consoles or computers that were epically awesome. So epically awesome, they failed completely in the marketplace.

The main reason the Amiga failed was due to poor management. I don't think anything has come out since then that had the same fun factor and the same hobbyist feel to it. Apple has likely come closest with the iPhone and MAC OS X but they discourage looking under the hood. Linux is mostly the opposite. In it's day the Amiga was the system that you could do just about anything on and have fun doing it. And nothing has captured that same feeling since then (just aspects of it as I mentioned earlier). It's a shame Commodore screwed things up.

Of course history has many examples of a superior product failing to an inferior one. Beta vs. VHS anyone (and another example of management mucking things up)? If anything, maybe the fact that it did fail proves that it was as great as many of us think it was.

FYI, I had an A500 and an A1200 with the 68030 + MMU and SCSI controller. The A1200 is buried under a bunch of stuff but it might still work.

I doubt he was a game developer, but Matt Dillon was a very active Amiga programmer in the day and wrote some invaluable tools. He even tried at one point to port linux to the Amiga but ran into too many issues trying to write a software-based MMU IIRC. Here's his wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M..._(computer_scientist)

Originally posted by Rollmops:Not related to the original inquiry, but I just found out about Pinball Dreams and Pinball Fantasies(strangely, digital illusions nowhere to be credited for the original work) being ported to the PSP & PS3 as minis, and I have to say it brought back very fond memories of Amiga gaming at it's finest...

Ooooh, oooh, where did you hear that? Probably my second and third favourite games on my old A500+ (after Turrican 2).

Aw man, I'd love to have these work out well on the PSP! I've an urge to play "Ignition" and "Stones and Bones"

Originally posted by Argel:@Hagen: Regrading Babylon 5, I think the pilot was done on Amigas but PCs were used for the the actual series.

I'd seen a couple of different sources and couldn't recall if it was just the pilot or not. Most seem to say the pilot was Video Toaster and later was other things, but it doesn't say if the transition happened before the first actual season or not. Whichever